I myself signed up for it but never did upload anything to it. As far as the fingerpointing in the above, I don’t really care (I personally believe the truth is somewhere in the middle). I’ve always been leery of entrusting important personal information to any online service (before, it was free online storage, then free web services, now its transformed into the cloud) as all too often, companies eventually go out of business when the funding dries up or consolidation takes place where who knows what could happen to your data.
With cloud computing, the premise is that most of the heavy lifting as well as data storage takes place on a network of computers hosted in some data center. Those who make use of Google’s web services already do this. Google of course is not some fly-by-night operation so the probability of losing access to your data is relatively low and it is highly unlikely the company would institute drastic changes which results in some of your data being held hostage (as a matter of fact, they’ve implemented a data liberation button which makes it easy to download a backup copy of everything).
But as the above reveals, one needs to tread with caution when dealing with smaller firms where the loss of data is much higher. Trust is something which needs to be earned over time (in terms of reliability, privacy, security). The take away from this is to make sure you have a backup redundancy plan where what is stored in the cloud isn’t the only backup, to use it for syncing purposes, or to only use such services as a method to temporarily store files for sharing purposes until the service has proven itself to be reliable and trustworthy.
